Resistance training could be a powerful weapon against depression

Resistance training's benefits go way beyond building big muscles: A new scientific paper demonstrates it might also be a great treatment for depression.

The mental health condition has far-reaching impacts: it's estimated 1 million Australians have depression in any one year, and around one in six will experience it at some point in their lives.

Depression is commonly treated via medication or psychotherapy, but these can be either costly, slow to work, or (for some) ineffective — so investigators are on the hunt for other complementary treatments.

A team led by Ireland's University of Limerick specifically set out to examine the effect of resistance training, which is pretty much anything that builds and strengthens your muscles and their power — lifting weights is the best known example, but it also includes bodyweight exercises, resistance bands and machines.

The researchers pored over more than 30 studies that included nearly 2,000 people, and found resistance training was linked to significant reduction in participants' depressive symptoms, regardless of age, sex, or their overall strength and health, or what kind of resistance training regimen they followed.

The paper notes that those with "mild to moderate depression had significantly larger improvements than those who did not", indicating resistance training could be more beneficial for those with more severe depression.

Future research is needed to nut out the optimum resistance training program for treating depression — which moves are best, how long they should be performed, for how many sets, and so on.

However, the data suggested sessions of less than 45 minutes, and those that were fully supervised by personal trainers, could be most effective.